(807) Kill the Moon

As titles go, Kill the Moon is certainly the most interesting. In an attempt to show Courtney that she’s special, the Doctor takes her to the Moon to be the first woman to walk there. This episode is where the Doctor and Clara’s relationship goes through a bit of a rough patch. Being set on the moon it means that this cant be filmed in a field in Cardiff. The filming for this episode took place in Lanzarote where the 1984 story Planet of Fire was filmed and I think a title that was suggested for it was Return to Sarn which was clearly a title designed to mislead. The TARDIS arrives on a shuttle which has a lot of nuclear bombs on it and its clear that things don’t go well in this episode. There is a wonderful base under siege vibe to this episode which if you are a regular reader of this blog, will know that this is my favourite type of story. Apart from the darkness and the isolation, the big success of this story are the spiders that scuttle around the place. The sight of one scuttling around in the dark is quite good and also the image of thousands of them scuttling across the moon is one that works and is one of the lasting image from the episode.

At one point the Doctor decides that he is leaving the fate of the moon to Clara and Lundvik (Hermione Norris) which does seem like a bold thing for the Doctor to do. I honestly cant see Matt Smith’s Doctor or David Tenannt’s Doctor doing this so this is another example if more were needed that Capaldi’s Doctor is a grumpier version of his previous incarnations.

When Captain Grumpy turns up at the end I think that he is going to be Sergeant Smug and pretty much tells Clara to calm down and be less angry. I thought that was quite a good move for him and he is still Captain Grumpy but at least there showed a glimmer of happy.

The big revelation is that the moon is an egg and its about to hatch. This has been a great cause of controversy because people think that it’s a stupid idea. I don’t agree with that simply because what Peter Harness has done is come up with a novel idea for something that is so much apart of the Earth. You see various stages of it at night time and ever since the episode aired, I have looked up and jokingly thought that the moon might have put a bit of weight on. It’s such a Doctor Who idea that I cant understand why people have a problem with this aspect of the story. There were bigger problems with this story. Most notably that of Hermione Norris. The problem is that her character isn’t very well served in this. Her character isn’t very imposing and just blends in with the others. Another problem is Courtney because she wants to be called special, then when they are on the moon and things go wrong she decides she wants to go back home and then when it looks like things are getting interesting again she wants to leave the TARDIS. Never has a character changed so much in one short episode. Thankfully she leaves at the end of this episode and is never seen again and good riddance as far as I am concerned. However the biggest concern that comes up in this episode is the relationship between Clara and the Doctor because we are in the seventh episode of the series and yet there is something that doesn’t quite right between them. I would have expected them to have bonded by now.

There comes a decision about whether to blow it up or let the thing hatch. There is this big deal about the Earth deciding what to do. In the end it’s a bit pointless because the Doctor comes and rescues Lundvik, Courtney & Clara and they arrive on earth just to see the moon hatch. Moments later it seems to hatch a new moon and things seem to be back to normal.

I like Kill The Moon, there are problems with it but ultimately the debut story from Peter Harness has written a story that is effectively in two parts because the first half is scary as anything that has been seen in new Who and the sort of thing that would have been seen in the Philip Hinchcliffe era which is always a good thing. He is returning to write for the new series of Doctor Who and hopefully he will improve on some of the flaws that happened in this episode and the good point suggest that he might just be able to do that.

(806) The Caretaker

If you use the numbering system that I have used in this marathon, then this story is the 250^th story of Doctor Who. The Caretaker is the midway point of the series and one that takes place at Coal Hill School. It’s nice having Coal Hill School feature in the show because after only having two appearances in the first 50 years, it seems to be featuring in the show more and more. Despite the positives of this story being co-written by Steven Moffat and Gareth Roberts there are things that I don’t like about this story. Sadly the biggest problem is that Danny Pink makes a return and I say sadly because this is where he well and truly becomes Mr Grump. He seems to develop a jealousy of the Doctor. There is a bit where he pulls one of the mine things that the Doctor has placed around the school and I think that anyone in their right mind wouldn’t touch them. When the Doctor gives him a ticking off I wanted the Doctor give him more than that. Pink has just turned into a whiney git all of a sudden.

The pre-title scene ends with the Doctor introducing himself as a caretaker so this is another. Most of the pre-title scene is filled with the Doctor and Clara going on many adventures and then Clara having to pick up her normal life with Danny. To be honest if I were Clara and I had the choice of travelling with the Doctor or spending time watching Coronation Street with Private Grumpy then it’s a no brainer really.  

This being a Gareth Roberts story there is more than an average amount of humour and one of the running gags is that the Doctor thinks that Danny Pink is a PE teacher and can’t retain the information in his head that he is in fact a maths teacher. There are plenty of good lines for the Doctor and like the previous story I cant figure out which lines are from Moffat and which ones are from Roberts. Also like the previous story I cant quite understand why it took two people to write this story.

Danny isn’t the only annoying person in this episode. The other is Courtney who is an annoying kid. She hangs around and is just an annoying person to have around. Maybe she is a relative of Danny’s. Speaking of Danny he really becomes an annoying arsehole because he gets really snotty when he is in the TARDIS thinking the Doctor is really pompous. Whenever the Doctor gets to be horrible to Danny I become a happy man. What can’t Danny be like Rory? Just a little bit. The worse crime that Danny commits in this story is by trying to turn Clara against the Doctor just because the Doctor seems like people Danny encountered in the army.

The monster threat of the story is in the form of the Skovox Blitzer which has become stranded on Earth and views everyone as a threat. The Doctor just wants to get it on Earth but he keeps getting distracted and stopped by humans. I could feel and understand the Doctor’s frustration because it just seemed to be either Danny or Courtney.

The final scene sees the police officer from earlier in the episode talking to Chris Addison (someone else from The Thick of It) who plays a character called Seb. He is someone who is working for Missy. Michelle Gomez makes a great cameo appearance in the episode. All she does is walk one way, look at Seb and then walk another way. This is something that exists purely to remind us about the story arc and also introduce Chris Addison into the arc. Seb uses several names to describe to the police officer where they are he uses names like the Promised Land, Nether sphere and Heaven.

When you take Danny and Courtney out of this story then I quite enjoyed this story. I thought that the monster threat was quite good and there was some good dialogue from whoever wrote the story. This time next week I will have finished this marathon and the ending is getting closer and closer which means I need to start think about what I am going to do with my evenings and days off.

(805) Time Heist

After being really let down with Listen, I was hoping that todays episode would be a return to form. My memories of this story is that it would be and it definelty proved to be. It felt more like a Doctor Who story than Listen. One thing that doesn’t quite come out of this story is why it took two people to write this story. Stephen Thompson who had previously written the weak The Curse of the Black Spot and the highly enjoyable Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS. He co-wrote this story with Steven Moffat and to be honest its not clear why it took two people or who wrote what. The pre-title scene is where things start to pick up for me. Things look rather normal at first for the Doctor and Clara but by the end of the scene they find themselves with memory worms and two other people.

The set up for the episode is that the Doctor and Clara (along with Psi and Saibra) have to break into a bank. The thing that they are breaking into to get is the thing that they all want. Psi wanted to get his memories back. Saibra came for gene suppressant so she stops morphing into other people. That aspect did seem like it was borrowed from X-Men but it doesn’t bother me too much.

They are left aids by the Architect and it’s someone that the Doctor hates and the revelation that he is the Architect which turns out to be him. There’s nothing like a bit of self-loathing to sooth the soul is there? The teller is a good idea and it works because its an idea that forces people to actually empty their minds. The teller is being mistreated and its not until the end that it finds it’s partner and they are left to roam free. There is something quite obvious about the fact that the Architect but I didn’t mind it.

Keeley Hawes is the big name of the episode as plays Ms Delphox. She runs the bank and she looks very similar in style to Sarah Lancashire in Partners in Crime. Ms Delphox turns out to be a clone of Madame Karabraxos that is there to help with the administrative running of the bank. The bit where an old and dying Madame Karabraxos ringing the Doctor is a bit of an unnecessary part of the story. That was the only thing that really didn’t do the story any benefits. One of the reasons why this story works so well is that the direction is really good. Douglas Mackinnon has done a great job in making it feel at times like an Oceans Eleven movie. The way we learn what happens between being a Clara’s home and finding themselves on with Psi and Saibra seems a bit like the show Hustle.

There was one line that the Doctor said which back in 2014 went unnoticed and was like a beacon today. I went for minimalism but came out with magician is a line which at the time didn’t seem to have much relevance but bearing in mind that the first episode of series 35 is called The Magicians Apprentice, it seems that this line has more relevance now.

This was a much better episode than Listen but that’s not much of a compliment. What is a compliment is that it’s a story that is well written and well directed and also the performances are fun to watch and this episode shows that Listen was just a blip. With there just twelve episodes in the series it means that we are near the half way point of the series and so far it has been a good opening series for Capaldi.

(804) Listen

Listen is a story that I felt in 2014 was the weakest of the series. This could be another example of poor episodes changing and watching it in this marathon would make me appreciate it and think that I was wrong when the episode first aired but I am sad to say that this didn’t happen for todays episode and its one of those rare instances where a story has actually gone down in my previous estimation.

Apparently other people seem to rate it quite highly. They talk about how clever it is and this is the scariest Steven Moffat script and the best episode in years. To be honest, that is all hogwash as I would go so far to say that it’s one of the worst stories of the new series.

I was prepared to give it a try but after about eight minutes I found myself giving up. From this moment on I was just waiting for the end of the episode to come because then it would be over. The pre-title scene is just the Doctor and it’s a very talkie scene which is unusual for most new series stories. That is the most entertaining part of the episode. I think this is the episode where my dislike for Danny Pink starts. Clara and Danny go on a date and it goes wrong quite quickly and to be honest this is all quite boring.

The Doctor and Clara end up in a children’s home in the 1990’s where Clara meets a young Danny and then goes into the future and meets a distance relative of Danny. The young Danny was quite entertaining but sadly that portion of the story didn’t last too long and then we were back to all the less interesting stuff. There are moments which are clearly designed to be the big scary moments but I am so disconnected from this story that they just looked like mildly entertaining scraps of drama.

I honestly thought that things would change watching this episode but nothing has. It might be too clever for me but I found the story to be a bit boring and there is very little chance of me deciding to watch this again outside of a marathon like this one. It’s not a bad story because of Jenna Coleman and Peter Capaldi but it’s the story in general that didn’t connect with me and I can accept that I am not smart enough to appreciate it but that’s just the way it is.

(803) Robot of Sherwood

I have just realised that this season has followed previous seasons by the first three episodes featuring a modern day story, a futuristic story and a historical story. The Doctor decides to let Clara decide where they go next and that is never a good idea really because its never really interesting. Clara wants to meet Robin Hood despite the Doctor pointing out he doesn’t exist. This is addressed during the course of the episode where he is real but ends up as fiction. This is a nice twist and Mark Gatiss manages to weave enough interesting things into the story to make it watchable. There is a good bit where a bow hits the TARDIS with the Doctor standing right next to it.

It’s quite funny how the Doctor seems to be jealous of Robin Hood. This shows a different side to Capaldi’s Doctor and a more comedic side which wasn’t going to show itself in the previous story. This being a Mark Gatiss story, there are going to be some moments that you wouldn’t get with any other writer and most notably comes when The Doctor is having a sword/spoon fight with Robin Hood.

Ben Miller is the big name star and plays the Sheriff of Nottingham. To be honest I think that Miller is wasted in this role because it doesn’t come across as a convincing villain. It’s like he is trying to channel Alan Rickman’s version of the Sheriff in Prince of Thieves.

The story takes quite a long time to get interesting. It takes about a quarter of an hour before the episode settles down and that’s a strange thing for a Mark Gatiss script because his stories normally get going from the very beginning. It doesn’t get interesting until the Sheriff’s army are revealed to be robots and when their helmets are pulled back their faces are quite good.

There was supposed to be a beheading scene where Robin beheads the Sheriff revealing that he is a robot but due to real life events where people had been beheaded by ISIS meant that the BBC decided to cut this scene which I sort of agree with because it shows good judgement from the BBC and that was one less thing for the Daily Mail to have a go at the BBC. The death of the Sheriff happens when he falls into the vat of gold and all is left is a shot of his gold coloured hand.

There is a picture of Patrick Troughton when he played Robin Hood back in 1953. It was a nice blink and you’ll miss moment.

I cant quite put my finger on the reason why this story didn’t work but it is definelty the weakest story so far. What makes the situation slightly worrying is that Listen is coming up next and that is a story that I haven’t rated too highly on previous watches. Maybe things might change but I doubt it. The end is starting to get closer and closer and part of me feels like the remaining 10 episodes/days will feel like 10 months.  

(802) Into the Dalek

It could be argued that classic monsters are bought into help a new Doctor in their first season. It’s happened with each Doctor so far and so its happened with Capaldi’s Doctor. However instead of a normal Dalek story we get one that is quite inventive. Phil Ford returns to writing for Who after co-writing The Waters of Mars. This time is he co-writing with Steven Moffat and I wonder when he will be allowed to write a story on his own. The Doctor’s story gets started from the very beginning before the title plays and at that point he doesn’t have Clara with him so it’s a nice to see him going solo even if its just for a short while. The scene ends with the Doctor being asked to inside a Dalek and the Dalek saying Doctor which immediately raised a question as to how the Dalek new that the Doctor was standing in front of him. Then the title plays and the action moves back to Coal Hill School. That is an interesting shift in tone and one that works quite well but after a while I wanted the story to go back to the Dalek.

One of the things that doesn’t quite work in this series is the character of Danny Pink (played by Samuel Anderson). Sadly the character is annoying but that is more down to the writing that Anderson himself. Thankfully he starts off less annoying and seems rather amusing.

The Doctor asks Clara if he is a good man and she doesn’t know how to reply. I think that this one of the many good moments that take place in this episode. She doesn’t answer until the end when Clara says that he tries and that is enough which is probably a diplomatic way of saying that he could do better. The Doctor then says that Clara is his carer and she cares so that he doesn’t have to. This is another clear sign that this Doctor is less smiley than before. There is a bit where everyone thinks that the Doctor is saving one of the soldiers when in fact he was just trying to find where he gets dumped. This isn’t the sort of thing that other Doctors would have done or at least would have been a bit warmer about it.

The Doctor and Clara get miniaturised and its very similar to the film Innerspace which is gets referenced to during this episode. For me this is when the episode really starts to get enjoyable because we get to see inside a Dalek. The Dalek is suffering from a radiation leak and that is what the Doctor has to try and fix it and it happens but the clever thing is what happens next because the Dalek goes on a killer rampage and tells the other Daleks where it is and the Doctor is stuck inside the Dalek and cant do anything.

There is another appearance from Missy although Michelle Gomez isn’t credited at the end. She appears when Gretchen is killed by the Antibodies inside the Dalek. It’s a little scene that doesn’t have much impact on the overall story arc but works well for this episode.

As a Dalek story it was very inventive and there were some visually impressive moments and Ben Wheatley continues to show what a great director he is. Two episodes in and the series has settled down a bit with both Peter Capaldi and Jenna Coleman getting use to the new relationship and the next episode is one that I have had mixed feelings since I saw it last year.

(801) Deep Breath

So now I embark on the final stage of my marathon. Two weeks tonight I will be wondering what to do with my Saturday nights. At least I will be safe in the knowledge that I only have about six or seven weeks to wait until the new series. By the time this episode had aired, Peter Capaldi had been Doctor for 241 days which is longer than Christopher Eccleston had been which is a weird stat for me. This was another Doctor Who episode that was aired at the cinema however unlike the 50^th Anniversary special, I decided not to spend the money on the trip to the cinema. At the end of the episode I was sort of glad that I hadn’t paid £12 or whatever it was for the ticket.

The subject of age is something that was raised when Peter Capaldi was named as the Doctor. Capaldi is the same age (roughly) as William Hartnell when he became the Doctor and some people said they would stop watching Doctor Who because the Doctor was old. Well all I can say to that is good. If you’re the sort of person who stops watching a show because someone is too old then you can quite frankly p**s off and go and watch Eastenders or something equally brain numbing. Capaldi is young enough to be the Doctor and shows it in this episode.

The first shot of the episode was rather tame compared to previous first shots of new Doctor stories. The first shot is of a T-Rex in London. It might seem like the T-Rex would in the story for a while but lasts about twenty minutes after it from a distant burns into flames.

Capaldi’s first proper scene is rather good cause it gets all the mad bonkers stuff out of the way quite quickly. It was quite funny cause he gets Clara and Strax confused and calls Clara the ‘not me one’. I immediately liked Capaldi’s Doctor as it wasn’t the crazy sort that we have become use to since 2005. There was a moment where the Doctor seemed to abandon Clara and I thought that this isn’t something that Smith’s Doctor would have done. His best scene comes with his final scene with the Half-Face Man and there is a nice question as to whether the Half Face Man jumped two his death or did the Doctor push him. It nice that we don’t get a definitive answer about this. Jenna Coleman gives another solid performance although it is still frustrating that we have another companion who witnesses a regeneration and still doesn’t believe that the new Doctor is their Doctor. It was what Rose did in The Christmas Invasion. Matt Smith makes a surprising cameo in this episode and it was a clever move of Moffat to keep us guessing about that. It was a nice moment because it meant we got one final solid speech from Smith and it was basically the Doctor telling Clara to help the new Doctor. This is the closest that Steven Moffat has got to being RTD in the slushy scenes department.

There is a new theme tune and a new title sequence and they are two things that I wasn’t 100% keen on at first but it has grown on me. There is a minor tweak to the console room with roundels being put on the walls (sort of). There is a nice joke about having round things before but not knowing where they went.

I find it amusing how the Doctor assumes that everyone who doesn’t talk Scottish isn’t talking normal. He seems to definelty be a Scottish Doctor and there is a nice bit where he seems to make reference to the Scottish Referendum which was still about a month away when this was transmitted in August 2014.

This still being a Doctor Who episode, it had to actually have a plot and the one that Steven Moffat went with didn’t have an in your face narrative but a slow and inventive one. They are after human parts

The visual effects used to create the clockwork heads is very good and almost looks real. The Clockwork  men are a reused creation from a previous Steven Moffat story (The Girl in the Fireplace) which I thought was a nice nod and an unexpected one.

There is a nice cameo from the widow of Elisabeth Sladen. He plays a tramp and I thought it was a lovely moment and one that Elisabeth Sladen would have liked very much. There is a bit where Vastra and Jenny kiss and there were complaints saying that the BBC had a blatant gay agenda which made me chuckle. One is a human and the other is a lizard so the blatant gay agenda is a bit stupid really.

The bit where the Impossible Girl ad is placed in the newspaper is the start of the Missy storyarc. Its good that Clara thinks that it’s the Doctor but its not. There is talk from one of the clockwork people about the promised land which is a term I think that is used a few times in the series. The final scene of the episode sees the appearance of Missy played by Michelle Gomez and as Missy she refers to her boyfriend implying the Doctor. Missy is a very good and I knew when I watched it (weird that it was last year) and knew she would be a good addition to the cast.

Ben Wheatley directs his first Doctor Who and does a very good job. He manages to make the whole story move along at the sort of pace it needs to at different times. Wheatley is a movie director that somehow has been lured to Doctor Who and his abilities as a good director have allowed this story to have a different feel and I enjoyed the directing immensely.

Despite being glad that I didn’t pay £12, I did enjoy this episode very much. The longer running time was something that allowed things to settle down and for Capaldi to show us just how good of a Doctor he could be. He isn’t going to be the happy cheery running around Doctor like Matt Smith or David Tennant but his Doctor is very similar to Colin Baker and I think that it’s the Timothy Dalton/Daniel Craig thing because Dalton’s Bond is very serious and the films are tough which is what Craig’s Bond and films are like but Dalton wasn’t appreciated at the time and I think that Colin Baker’s Doctor wasn’t appreciated at the time and Capaldi should be able to show that you can have a slightly grumpy Doctor but the trick will be towing the fine line between grumpy and downright bleak. It’s never wise to judge the state of things after one episode but this era of the show is already showing signs of promise.